I've seen a problem for many different versions (latest 8.2) of Mandrake with Samba before, and I may have even inquired about it before. Whether it is a problem with Samba I have no idea, but I suspect not. I'm trying to get some info/advice about what might be potentially the problem before going to Samba mailing lists to query them.
Some of you might already be familiar with the strange way that Linux will often disallow umount-ing or listing directory contents of a mounted smb share, returning the error text, "Input/output error." I believe this error happens when a smb share is mounted, then that remote share is removed. This is a seriously annoying problem, because restarting Samba does not solve the problem, nor does changing runlevels. Which is why I think it may be a kernel-level problem. I have tried changing the runlevel to [S]ingle level user, which is running pretty much nothing save kernel processes and a simple shell. At this level, a 'mount' command still shows the shares to be mounted, and also at this level it is still impossible to umount them. The only solution that I have found so far is rebooting, which I think is an unacceptable way to handle such a problem. Now the interesting part. During the time that I could not remove the unmountable mounted smb shares, the dhcpd daemon also seemed to start malfunctioning. On the Mandrake box, everything seemed fine (that is, I restarted the dhcpd daemon which had no complaints during the restart). But none of the other machines that get served on the network from it were getting addresses. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to sniff packets, so I don't know what kind of communication (or lack thereof) was occurring. It was a frustrating exercise trying to figure out why my other boxes were not getting addresses. Strangely enough, when I rebooted the Mandrake box again, everything worked as normal -- the other boxes got their IP addresses fine. I don't know for sure if the dhcpd thing was related to the smb mount problem, but I'll try to repeat the problem and see if it recurs. If anybody has seen the same problem or something similar, I would appreciate it if you could share how you resolved it. Thanks, Rob
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